AI Companies Are Destroying Books

[gvopedz]

the company has bought millions of books, sliced off their bindings, scanned the pages, and shredded the originals

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-companies-destroying-books-what-will-this-mean-for-art-1234798445/

[bichos]

[Big Beat Steve]

Not new (but still not nice). Was in the media over here for the first time several months back. And made it into a story in our daily newspaper today, in fact. A Canadian used book seller named Zoom Books seems to have started this landslide buying among European antiquarian online listings. Estimates run to up to 700,000 different publications in Germany and several million in Europe that were bought up by Anthropic that way. 
The bottom line of today's newspaper story: Those books affected by this "recycling" process to go into AI "knowledge" are books that carry an ISBN number. I.e. post-1970 publication date only. "Bots can only initiate orders by working from these ISBN numbers." One antiquarian said: "These included obscure non-fiction items too ... I was quite pleased because many of them, objectively speaking, were "shelf warmers" (dead stock to me) that I would eventually have had to discard". He sold about 150 books at prices between 10 and 40 euros within two weeks. "Other antiquarians have made a turnover of some 10,000 EUR". The president of the German association of antiquarians was quoted with a more nuanced stance: "No valuable antiques from German book stores are being bought up, but only books published in larger printing runs. And not much harm is done if individual copies of mass publications go under in this process."

That antiquarian who was pleased to shift his "dead stock" IMO sums up one major aspect of the problem. There just are so many books that do not have a market anymore with the general buying public. Either because the subject is way too specialized or because its contents have been outdated by more recent publications on exactly the same topic and are not of sufficient interest to the historically minded either. I have inherited a lot of books from my ancestors over time and hate to throw books away (which is one reason why I still set up fleamarket stalls). But you cannot keep everything, and it is obvious many that you give away to those bring-and-take community book counters will soon be weeeded out by their curators too. So, only recently, after completing another book fleamarket stall day, I discarded a handful of books that were no run-of-the-mill stuff (from a wide range of fields) and sometimes fairly old, but after repeated "no takers" their time was up for me. Covers into the residual garbage can, pages into the paper garbage can. (Acting like Anthropic, I know  )

Still the Anthropic practice is rather worrying in the long run IMO but also a reflection of today's state of society. Books and their contents are increasingly taken for granted wherever you look, particularly in view of increased online accessibility.  Yet I am sure there are those who (no doubt) will moan about these buying up and recyling practices but OTOH couldn't care less about buying and owning tangible BOOKS in their own fields of interest. Not least of all because they don't care looking beyond their limited personal horizons. Like those who openly told me at a fleamarket when perusing my vinyl and after I had shown them my jazz books on offer: " I listen to the music but I don't care about reading about it." Oh well .. to each his own ... 

Edited September 18 by Big Beat Steve

[Rabshakeh]

Good to have this more nuanced view.

The articles in the newspapers obviously took the position that these were rare antiquarian books being wantonly destroyed, but I think even then it did look more likely that they were moldering older stock.

Frankly I think deliberately misleading reporting like this from even formerly serious newspapers is as much if not more of a problem than AI slop. If you don't have the correct information, you cannot fix the problem.

Anyway, here's hoping it leads AI to start sounding a bit less like a mix of BuzzFeed and an HR department and a bit more like Nero Wolfe. 

On the subject of the books themselves, part of me is happy that these booksellers are getting an injection of cash like this. I hate the feeling of going into a used bookshop and seeing that the shelves are full of this stuff that no one would want to ever read. Mass market paper backs are one thing, but there is the deadening feel of looking at a sea of mouldering long replaced academic and legal text books and thinking "what value does this have to anyone"?

I'd throw all the AI in the world into the sea, quite happily. But i think exchanging money for this dead stock is a good outcome. If anything, it is money flowing from the financial investors funding these unprofitable companies into the hands of booksellers.